Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
Starvation wages are slavery. And yes. Our techocolonial society engages at it at many levels. No. We should not be okay with it. We should do what we can do disengage from businesses that engage in it, and we should be self forgiving of ourselves when we can’t. We should always be advocating for the workers, even if sometimes that means who we’re advocating for is us
These aren’t “starvation wages”. The average income in Kenya is about $1.25 per hour (or even half that depending where in the salary ranges you fall). They’re earning an average wage, up to twice the average wage. It’s a shit job, but compared to other jobs it’s not necessarily badly paid.
There are reasons to keep moderation and content filtering jobs within the west (cultural interpretations, labour protections, etc.) but if all companies did that, the economy of some developing nations would take a serious hit.
AI bullshit isn’t going to go away and we’re going to need moderation for it to work. You can choose to leave AI tools and social media behind for ethical reasons, but most people won’t. AI is giving people a competitive edge and the AI-Amish will eventually die out by simply not being as cheap and effective as their direct, local competition.
We can debate if traumatising Kenyans for average wages is better or worse than traumatising Americans, Europeans, or Asians for minimum wages, but I don’t think that’s a particularly productive discussion we’ll ever find an answer to.
We need laws for companies to make sure they provide appropriate psychological support no matter where their workers are hired.
Average wages in Nairobi is about $4/hr. These jobs weren’t generally high quality but they weren’t starvation, either.